The consensus is now in: The Federal Reserve will raise the interest rate — just a little — at its meeting next week.

In today’s column and in Thursday’s, I’m going to give you some fun facts and bold predictions about the months ahead and explain the problems the Fed will be facing at its upcoming meeting.

To begin, let’s stipulate — in lawyerspeak — to these basic facts. The Fed has kept interest rates near zero for seven years and the US economy, while growing most of that time, has been wimpy.

This has been the worse recessionary recovery in modern US history. The apologists like to call it “steady” growth. The critics would say it’s about as steady as the Knicks were last season — steadily in last place.

The US economy is growing at only a 1.5 percent annual pace in the last quarter of 2015. That’s a number provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and even that slow estimate might be too optimistic, since holiday sales seem to be coming in below expectations.

If you put that 1.5 percent together with the growth rates during the other three 2015 quarters — 2.1 percent in the third quarter, 3.9 percent in the second and 0.6 percent in this year’s first three months — you get average growth for the whole year of only 2.025 percent.

If these were normal times, the Fed wouldn’t even be thinking of increasing borrowing costs with the economic expansion that slow. The Fed would be risking a recession.

But these aren’t normal times.

The Fed needs to raise rates (so it can lower them in the future when necessary); wants to raise them (because it finally understands that it is bankrupting savers); and keeps promising to raise them (making anyone who takes the Central Bank at its word look foolish).

So, with its actions already becoming an issue in the presidential campaign, Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and her band of confused academics will finally do it.

The biggest problem is that the month-to-month changes in the job market aren’t trustworthy, as the Labor Department will repeatedly revise its employment figures until they are finally accurate.

As I’ve already explained, the strong employment growth in October was a fluke because of assumptions Labor makes about jobs being created by newly formed companies.

September’s weak growth, which last Friday was revised upward to a still very anemic 145,000 jobs, was also a fluke, but in the other direction. Labor’s models assumed (but can’t prove) companies go out of business in September and take jobs with them.

If you really want to know what the job market is doing, you need to look at the statistics over a longer time period. And you need to look at the raw data, which is happily provided by the Labor Department.

Don’t bother, I did it for you.

According to the department’s not-seasonally-adjusted table, employment hit a pre-recession high of 139.4 million jobs in November 2007. The US didn’t get back to that level until June 2014, when there were 139.9 million jobs.

This past September, the total number of jobs in the US was 142.6 million. That’s the last firm number. The preliminary data for November was 144.1 million, but that number could still be revised.

Do the math and you will probably draw the incorrect conclusion that employment is finally healthy.

But here’s the problem with the glass-half-full view of those numbers. First, we are only a little bit better off right now — 3.1 million jobs, to be exact — than we were back in November 2007. So the job market has barely absorbed the millions of people who lost their jobs during the recession.

The job market hasn’t even begun to accommodate new workers — high school and college grads, immigrants, etc. — who have been trying to enter the workforce for the first time over the past seven years.

That problem shows up in something called the Civilian Employment to Population Ratio, produced by the Labor Department. It shows that only 59 percent of adult Americans are working. That number was more than 63 percent when the recession hit.

The ratio hasn’t been this low since the early 1980s.

Again, the apologists have an explanation: People just don’t want to work these days; they are retiring. That argument is flawed when you look at Labor Department tables. They show that the number of older workers — many denied income because of low interest rates — is actually growing.

And there’s the issue of the quality of jobs that are created. In the November Labor survey of households also released last Friday, the number of people who said they were working part time because that’s the only job they could find rose by 319,000, after declines in the previous two months.

Slice and dice these numbers any way you want, but this much is clear — the US economy is still growing at a weak pace.

But what’s going to happen to the economic numbers in the next few months could truly be amazing.